The Los Angeles City Council has stepped back into the cockpit of Van Nuys Airport politics, voting Friday, to reassert control over the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council after a controversial shakeup by the airport’s Board of Airport Commissioners that added a new residency rule and reshuffled seats.
In its vote, the Council asked Los Angeles World Airports to pull together every prior bylaw tweak into one clean, codified rulebook and to come back with recommendations on how the CAC’s membership should work going forward. Councilmembers said the move is aimed at settling a basic but suddenly murky question: who gets to appoint members, and who exactly the advisory body is supposed to represent.
A motion from Councilmembers Imelda Padilla and Nithya Raman directs LAWA to prepare a report spelling out options for Council oversight and to post a single, consolidated set of Van Nuys CAC bylaws on LAWA’s website, according to the motion filed with the City Clerk. The motion points out that earlier actions by the Board of Airport Commissioners have produced overlapping and sometimes conflicting versions of the council’s rules and asks that the City Council get a clear look at the full picture. The Trade, Travel and Tourism Committee advanced the item in late January, sending it to the full Council this week.
What the CAC does and who sits on it
The Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council was set up in 1985 to keep an eye on Van Nuys Airport operations and offer advice to the Board of Airport Commissioners, the mayor, and the City Council. The panel has typically operated as a 20-member body that includes three BOAC appointees, three mayoral appointees and two seats for each council district that borders the airport, as outlined by Los Angeles World Airports.
BOAC’s October resolution and the change
That long-standing structure took a hit in a resolution adopted Oct. 16, 2025, when the Board of Airport Commissioners cut Council District 5’s representation from two members to one and imposed new criteria for council-appointed CAC members, including a requirement that they live in the district they represent. The same resolution instructs LAWA staff to run periodic audits tied to election cycles to check flight path and noise maps for each council district and determine whether a district should continue to hold appointment power. The document states that, after the 2022 redistricting, CD5 “no longer includes any portion of the San Fernando Valley” and that its “exposure to operations at Van Nuys Airport has been substantially reduced,” according to the Board of Airport Commissioners.
Neighbors say the board’s changes cut locals out
The response from some Valley residents was swift. Community advocates blasted the new residency rule as a “double standard,” arguing that it bites only council appointees while mayoral and BOAC picks can still come from outside directly affected neighborhoods, according to CityWatch. Two former CAC members, Marykate Harris and Wayne Williams, signed on to a Valley community statement criticizing the airport’s move, and Williams wrote that “LAWA’s misuse of authority ... must be resisted,” in an email quoted by MyNewsLA.
Council response
The full City Council voted 10 to 0 on Feb. 27 to request LAWA’s report and a single, codified set of CAC bylaws, with five councilmembers absent for the vote, according to MyNewsLA. In the motion, Councilmember Imelda Padilla said the board’s recent actions “underscore a need for greater clarity, and codified council oversight regarding how it operates its structure.” The step does not by itself overturn the BOAC resolution, but it puts the Council squarely back in the mix when it comes to deciding who speaks for neighborhoods around Van Nuys Airport.
What happens next
Under the existing BOAC resolution, LAWA staff are already supposed to audit residency and flight path exposure for district-appointed members and report those findings. The Council’s new motion asks LAWA to fold those audits, along with any earlier bylaw changes, into its recommendations, according to the filing with the City Clerk. Councilmembers also want every old and new bylaw change compiled, codified, and posted on LAWA’s website so that the public can see one definitive set of rules instead of a patchwork. Depending on what comes back in LAWA’s report and any follow-up actions, the Council could move in the coming months to lock oversight language into the CAC bylaws or pursue other administrative fixes.
